Waymo Road Trip Visiting 10+ Cities in 2025

Waymo continues to expand its service and testing, and in 2025, that’s going to include a road trip to more than 10 additional cities. Note that we have no idea how many cities Waymo will begin robotaxi service in this year, if any, but I do presume it will roll out in a few more — I’m guessing three.

What we do know is what the company just shared: “On the road again: As Waymo prepares for broader scale, we’re embarking on our largest road trip to date, visiting 10+ cities in 2025. First up: Las Vegas and San Diego.”

Waymo also points us to a November 2023 blog post in which the company explained how road trips help to improve Waymo Driver’s AI. Here’s a chunk from that post explaining their approach to road trips:

“Each time we test the Waymo Driver in regions far from where we typically operate, we prioritize safety and are mindful of our footprint. Here’s what we do on these road trips:

• Travel First, we bring a small fleet of vehicles equipped with the Waymo Driver to a new city, and sometimes, we return to cities we’ve visited before. Testing fleets are limited and closed to the public. Initially, human specialists drive these vehicles manually to help provide the Waymo Driver context of where it’s operating. ‌
• Drive Once the Waymo Driver understands the lay of the land, the vehicles can begin driving autonomously. During these trips, human specialists provide feedback to our engineering teams on the driving experience and flag unique nuances that might come with operating in new areas. Simultaneously, our engineering team can evaluate the Waymo Driver’s performance in a virtual replica of the new location to measure how it generalizes.
• Apply Our teams use the new learnings and insights gathered during this time to continue refining the Waymo Driver’s capabilities and service experience. Driving in dozens of different cities over the years has helped inform the design and capabilities of our sensing technology, improve the Waymo Driver’s performance in the cities we already operate, and safely bring our technology to new places. With this applied learning/knowledge, we will progress even faster with each new place we bring the Waymo Driver, and eventually have fewer novel situations that we’ll have to teach the Driver to navigate. For example, our rain testing in Miami was instrumental in enabling us to serve riders fully autonomously in wet and rainy conditions in California and Phoenix.”

In addition to this, Waymo is expanding its service for employees in Los Angeles. The company is starting to provide fully autonomous rides for them there that go on freeways. While Waymo won’t be driving such routes for non-employee customers yet, the plan is to get to that point after this stage of development, which is a stage that’s fairly far along.

I expect 2025 could be a big year for Waymo. I think we’ll see the company expand into a few more cities — that is, launch commercial operations there — and also expand its service area in existing markets (Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco). But we’ll see — it’s always hard to forecast progress on this kind of thing.